Bernie Masters is a geologist/zoologist who spent 8 years as a member of the Western Australian Parliament. Married to Carolina since 1976 and living in south west WA, Bernie is involved in many community groups. This blog offers insights into politics, the environment and other issues that annoy or interest him. For something completely different, visit www.fiatechnology.com.au for information about vegetated floating islands - the natural way to improve water quality.

Sunday, October 22, 2017

The Rise of Identity Politics: An Audit of History Teaching at Australian Universities

The Rise of Identity Politics: An Audit of History Teaching at Australian Universities
The Australian newspaper:
Janet Albrechtsen, Columnist

"Bad ideas flourish in dark places. The Rise of Identity Politics: An Audit of History Teaching
at Australian Universities in 2017, ­released on Monday by the
Institute of Public Affairs, exposes the dirty ­little secret about
history teaching in Australian universities. Rather than rigorous
learning about ­important historical events that underpin our
dem­o­cracy, history teaching in this country is drenched in identity
politics.

Worse, this
distortion of history into political ideology is a bellwether of a more
profound political disorder that threatens the future of our Australian
liberal project.

In a healthy liberal democracy, we contest ideas
and we know our democracy is in good shape when the best ideas triumph
and the bad ones are sent packing. The Berlin Wall wasn’t dismantled by
soldiers but by ideas about individual freedom that appealed more than
communism. Today a different menace threatens our democratic health, one
that seeks to dismantle our tool for trouncing bad ideas. We’re not
just quibbling over different ideas; we’re also arguing over the value
of having a healthy contest of ideas. Skewed history teaching is
symptomatic of a contest that will determine the future of our
democratic project.

The audit by Bella d’Abrera — director of the
IPA’s Foundations of Western Civilisation Program and who has a PhD in
history from Cambridge University — of 746 history subjects taught
across 35 Australian universities found that more subjects (244) focus
on the politics of indigenous issues, other race topics, questions of
gender, environment and identity than the story of Western civilisation.
More history subjects mention race than the Enlightenment by a factor
of four to one. The Reformation is cited in only 12 of the 746 subjects
and liberalism is mentioned only seven times. More subjects reference
Islam than Christianity.

Drawing on work done by British
historian Niall Ferguson, who is professor of history at Harvard
University, the IPA prepared a list of 20 core topics in the history of
Western civilisation. They include ancient Rome, the Renaissance, the
Enlightenment, the Reformation, any period of British history, the US
revolution, the industrial revolution, Nazism, fascism, communism and
the Cold War, and more. The IPA audit found a strong focus on ancient
Greece and ancient Rome and the 20th century, “while the events of the
intervening millennia are relatively neglected”. In other words, the
great historical heritage that built our liberal democracy is not
offered by many history ­departments.
Writing online for The
Conversation on Thursday, Trevor Burnard, head of school and professor
of history at University of Melbourne, rebuked the audit as misguided,
arguing that history depart­ments faced two problems: limited funding
and students who weren’t interested in Western civilisation. Referring
to his own speciality, Burnard wrote: “The reason British history is
less taught now than it once was has little to do with politics, and
everything to do with student preferences. I would love for students to
be fascinated in what I am interested in. Some are. But most aren’t.”

If students arrive at university with little curiosity about the
historical triumph of freedom, it’s ­because we haven’t passed on that
legacy to them. Students aren’t taught the astonishing story of Western
civilisation at school or university. And the adult realm of politics is
equally useless.
As IPA executive director John Roskam writes in
Audit of History Teaching, we’re in trouble when a senior Liberal MP,
federal Treasurer Scott Morrison, waves away the most fundamental
freedom in a liberal democracy, freedom of expression, as something that
“doesn’t create a single job (and) doesn’t open a business”.

When Gillian Triggs, the former boss of the Australian Human Rights
Commission entrusted to defend fundamental freedoms, scolded Australia
as a country where “Sadly, you can say what you like around the kitchen
table at home”, we’re in double trouble.

And taxpayer-funded
public broadcaster ABC, committed to all kinds of diversity except a
diversity of voices, signals a preference for ideological homogeneity,
not a healthy contest of ideas that emerged from the Enlightenment.

As Roskam says, this contest of ideas gave us a “legacy of liberty, of
inquiry, of toleration, of relig­ious plurality, and of social and
economic freedom. Western civilisation pioneered the recognition of
universal human rights.” He quotes Rufus Black, the master of Ormond
College at the University of Melbourne, in The Importance of a Liberal
and Sciences Education: “The triumph of freedom and reason is not a law
of physics, it is just an idea that has captured our minds for a tiny
period of human history. There is no certainty it will continue to do so
unless we choose to argue for its values and ensure that we pass it on
as it was passed on to us, hard won from authoritarian rule of many
forms.”
The historic battles, physical and metaphysical, that
shaped our modern liberal project, where we are all equal, regardless of
skin colour, creed, sex or sexuality, should be the foundation stone of
every history department across Australian campuses. Instead, history
teaching is mired in the politics of race, sex, sexuality and identity.

This intellectual regression has its roots in postmodernism, and
identity politics has become its political arm. Under the dishonest
rubric of “progressive” politics, postmodernism cemented into
universities the notion that history and language are corrupted by those
who hold power. Ergo history needs to be told through the lens of
oppression and language needs to be proscribed to protect victims of the
oppressors.

Under the same sham of protecting people,
universities are now cottonwool campuses. Last week at Cambridge
University, students were given a trigger warning about Shakespeare’s
play Titus Andronicus. The Bard’s work has been added to a growing list
of literature — F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Ovid and Euripides —
now deemed offensive by coddled students and muddled academics. Last
week To Kill a Mockingbird was removed from a school district in
Mississippi because it also offends students. A decade ago, this
anti-intellectualism would have been unthinkable.
Determined to
police words and speech, proponents of identity politics label opponents
as racists, sexists, misogynists, homophobes and Nazis. The aim is to
drive a spoke into that critical piece of ­intellectual machinery known
as the marketplace of ideas because critical thinking threatens their
­regressive ideas.

Worse, the demand of identity politics that
people be treated differently according to race, sex, sex­uality and
other forms of identity threatens the core premise of our liberal
project that all individuals are of equal moral worth. It’s a staggering
inversion of the great civil rights battles of the past century, and a
reminder that when people are ill-informed about the past, they are
likelier to ­embrace a less liberal future. The latest Lowy Institute
Poll where only 52 per cent of people aged ­18 to 29 believe that
“democracy is preferable to any other kind of government” is not
shocking, it’s inevitable.

Halting the momentum of ­regressive
identity politics depends on an intellectual army of iconoclasts who
understand that the story of our liberal project must be learned,
defended and passed on to the next generation. We need free thinkers
such as Camille Paglia, the feminist who, this month, exposed how
women’s and gender studies departments came to be “frozen at a certain
point of ideology in the 1970s”. Only a radical will ask, what has
gender studies contributed to the sum of human knowledge? And rebels
such as Jonathan Haidt, the American social psychologist leading the
push for universities to reclaim their positions as places of
intellectual curiosity. And Lionel Shriver, too, the American author who
­exposed the fundamental flaw of identity politics during her past
visit to Australia: “I don’t believe that membership of a larger group
constitutes identity. I don’t think being female provides me with an
identity. I don’t think it means that I have a character. That’s not my
idea of what character is.”

In his recent book, The Strange Death
of Europe, British author Douglas Murray traces the triumph of cultural
masochists — “only the nations of Europe and their descendants allow
themselves to be judged by their lowest moments”. This pathology of
guilt has led to a “guilty, jaded and dying culture” in Europe and this
virus is spreading across the West.

And let’s not mince words.
When the heritage of Western civilisation is devalued in Australian
schools and university history departments, debased by our political
parties and human rights ­bureaucracies, and snubbed by sections of the
media too, it ­becomes a numbers game. I joined the IPA years ago
because the ­voices of freedom need critical mass so that the virtues of
freedom can be nurtured, defended and passed on to the next generation
to do the same. The way forward is to instil in each generation an
understanding that our great inheritance comes from the story of Western
civilisation. That’s why Roskam and his team at the IPA are ­engaged in
this critical contest of ideas that must not be dismantled by the
self-loathing politics of identity. Consider this a call to arms."